Mansfield Park
Aug. 21st, 2019 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smokingbootMP's got to be one of Jane Austen's least popular novels, or at least it showcases one of her least popular heroines. It's become my second favourite Austen, sandwiched between P&P in the top spot, and Emma slapped down in third.
How I hated it! It was not easy to admire a girl called Fanny. She was shy and quiet and modest and polite and always right, and the anti-heroine was Mary Crawford, a girl who sparkled like Elizabeth Bennet only with money.
Above all, Fanny watches and understands. Her agency is extremely limited; she can do stillness. She is still with all her might when a clever sexual predator causes havoc among her beautiful confident relations, still when he comes for her. Oh, it's never loud, not in Austen. Henry Crawford likes to make women fall in love with him not above a little emotional ruin; a gameplayer who comes into Fanny's life when she's 18 and he needs entertainment. The book is not erotic, but there is something about it for sure, the sexual charge between the dazzlingly witty flirt and the man Fanny loves but shouldn't because he's her surrogate brother, the encroaching cleverness of the seducer and the girl who knows it's not in him to mean it. And then he falls in love with her and everyone she has ever looked up to thinks she should accept his offer of marriage because he's so genuine and so rich.
Money and sex, power and powerlessness... Yes, I grew to appreciate the book. But the films have always been dismal. One had Billie Piper playing Fanny, the seemingly dull girl transformed into a bouncing juicy blonde falling out of her dress. Another was a sort of gothic rendition which captured the feeling by discarding the plot. In it, Fanny becomes a sensible blue-stocking type, a woman of hidden passions. Shyness and quiet are not admired qualities in these squawking times, and in any case are seldom easy to depict on screen. But if Fanny can't magnetise, Henry Crawford can, if a suitably charismatic - not handsome - actor could be found.
It's the film I would love to direct, just as the Tempest is the play I would love to direct.
There now, just one of those things I'll never do...
How I hated it! It was not easy to admire a girl called Fanny. She was shy and quiet and modest and polite and always right, and the anti-heroine was Mary Crawford, a girl who sparkled like Elizabeth Bennet only with money.
Above all, Fanny watches and understands. Her agency is extremely limited; she can do stillness. She is still with all her might when a clever sexual predator causes havoc among her beautiful confident relations, still when he comes for her. Oh, it's never loud, not in Austen. Henry Crawford likes to make women fall in love with him not above a little emotional ruin; a gameplayer who comes into Fanny's life when she's 18 and he needs entertainment. The book is not erotic, but there is something about it for sure, the sexual charge between the dazzlingly witty flirt and the man Fanny loves but shouldn't because he's her surrogate brother, the encroaching cleverness of the seducer and the girl who knows it's not in him to mean it. And then he falls in love with her and everyone she has ever looked up to thinks she should accept his offer of marriage because he's so genuine and so rich.
Money and sex, power and powerlessness... Yes, I grew to appreciate the book. But the films have always been dismal. One had Billie Piper playing Fanny, the seemingly dull girl transformed into a bouncing juicy blonde falling out of her dress. Another was a sort of gothic rendition which captured the feeling by discarding the plot. In it, Fanny becomes a sensible blue-stocking type, a woman of hidden passions. Shyness and quiet are not admired qualities in these squawking times, and in any case are seldom easy to depict on screen. But if Fanny can't magnetise, Henry Crawford can, if a suitably charismatic - not handsome - actor could be found.
It's the film I would love to direct, just as the Tempest is the play I would love to direct.
There now, just one of those things I'll never do...
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